


Household

by moon_custafer



Category: People Will Talk (1951)
Genre: Atomic Age, Cold War, Environmentalism, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lionel secretly worries a lot, Multi, The Arc of This Movie Is Long But It Bends Towards Fluff, vintage printing technology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-06-20 09:36:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 5,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15531390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_custafer/pseuds/moon_custafer
Summary: Professor Lionel Barker went to Noah’s house fully prepared to dislike his friend’s new wife.Series of ficlets, extending over several years.





	1. Vestibule

Professor Lionel Barker went to Noah’s house fully prepared to dislike his friend’s new wife; but Debra, with a friendly handshake, disarmed him to a state of cautious appreciation.

He realized afterwards he’d been expecting one of those American women who extended their hand to be kissed at the slightest hint of a European accent; and who then usually took it as a calculated insult when he performed the greeting properly, rather than slobbering all over their knuckles. The professor blamed Rudolph Valentino – if the man weren’t dead, he’d dig him up and give him a cuff on the ear.

He realized he and Debra had become friends a few days later: when Noah, fussing over the optimum location for a geranium, and after ten minutes of trying it at different points along the sill of the picture-window in the living room, picked up the plant, marched to the fireplace, and set the pot firmly on the mantlepiece with a shouted _AND STAY THERE!_ at which point Lionel and Debra found themselves exchanging the first of many conspiratorial looks of fond, frustrated amusement over their mad genius.


	2. Back Yard

“Are any of the plums ripe yet?”

Noah examined the lower-hanging fruits.

“I’m afraid they’re all still green, Angela darling.”

“Pick me up,” said the little girl. “I want to look.” Obediently her father lifted her to the height of his shoulder while she confirmed his findings with a disappointed sigh.

“You see, I wasn’t lying,” Noah said. Angela looked at him with her great serious eyes.

“I know you wouldn’t lie, Daddy, I just thought you might be _wrong_.”

“She’s _definitely_ meant for the sciences,” Lionel stage-whispered to Debra. He was sprawled in one of their Adirondack chairs, reminding her, as he often did, of a big lazy ginger cat.

“I’m amazed that little tree has plums at all this year,” she replied from the neighboring chair. “It’s still barely taller than Noah. Still, I guess it’s taken to our yard like a duck to water — can you say that about a tree? Ugh,” she added. “I can’t think — haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in the past week. This second baby is enormous compared to Angela, and it wants out.”

The professor patted his belly in sympathy:

“Don’t worry, my dear,” he winked. “Just another fortnight and you’ll be back to your usual self. I, on the other hand, will _still_ be huge and absent-minded.”

“You can get your exercise chasing around after Angela, then,” grinned Noah, coming over to them with his small daughter still on his shoulders, “while Debra and I look after the new one.”

Lionel still worried about Noah sometimes. The professor’s ideas on What Could Go Wrong were extensive and derived from practical experience as well as theory, and he suspected Noah didn’t realize quite how narrow his escape from Dr. Elwell’s machinations had really been. For his own part he was surprised Elwell hadn’t tried again after Angela was born, since presumably the man could count; but it seemed even Rodney Elwell couldn’t get a scandal started around a child so obviously loved and wanted by the two legally-married people whose names appeared on her birth certificate.

Still, even if Elwell never tried again, there would be other Elwells; and even a man possessed of near-supernatural charm and who appeared to have been born and raised in a Marx Brothers picture couldn’t keep all the plates spinning forever.

Lionel worried too about how Noah would take it when Shunderson finally died – for good, this time. He glanced at the quiet old man hovering near the family, with the dog Beelzebub sitting at his feet. Noah was Noah — he was compassionate by nature as well as by profession; but Lionel could never help feeling uneasy around blank faces and silence, even when he knew no malice lay behind them.

Then little Angela, back on the ground again, ran over to the dog, who licked her face, tail wagging. Shunderson’s expression lit up as he looked down at them, and the professor felt ashamed of his fears.


	3. Living Room

“STOP JUMPING YOU’RE MAKING THE NEEDLE SKIP!” piped six-year-old Angela Praetorius at her little brother. Debra nudged Noah and gave him the look that said _your turn._

Angela had recently discovered a four-disc record album of _La Traviata_ in Noah’s collection, and although Debra wondered how much of the opera’s plot her precocious daughter had read in the liner notes, and whether this was going to lead to another meeting at the school (she’d already explained to three teachers that Beelzebub was the name of their dog), she was grateful the child had at least one LP she would listen to all the way through. Angela would play the record of Bruch’s _Scottish Fantasy_ over and over, but she really only liked the finale, and had become adept at picking up the needle and delicately setting it down just before the groove where the setting of “Scots Wha Hae” began. She also only liked the first of Dvořák’s _Slavonic Dances_.

For such an active little girl, she seldom if ever tried to dance to music, preferring to sit cross-legged next to the record player, staring at the spinning 45s and LPs with an expression of the utmost seriousness. Her three-year-old brother, by contrast, would leap and tumble as though he were auditioning for Martha Graham's dance company the moment he heard the first few notes of anything.

“It’s no good shouting,” said Noah to his daughter. “You’re just going to have to teach Bobby some calmer dances, like the waltz.”

“But I don’t know the waltz!” Angela wailed. “At New Year’s when we were dancing you and Grandpa just picked me up, and my feet didn’t do _anything_.”

“Nor did they. What a tragic gap we’ve left in your education.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means ‘would you like me to teach you?’”

“Yes please,” said Angela, getting up from the floor. Noah folded his newspaper and put it down on the table.

“Now to start,” he said, standing up and going over to his daughter, “let’s pretend there are invisible connections joining our feet at the toes — that is, when I move my foot back, you move _your_ foot on the same side forward...”

Debra’s father ambled into the room.

”Is it New Year’s again already?” he asked, seating himself on the sofa with a slight wince that Debra and Noah did not miss.

”Now, now, Arthur. You can cut in later.”

”Think I may sit this one out entirely,” Mr. Higgins sighed. “When Elliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, it must not have been a rainy day in March.”

Noah paused mid-step.

”Would you like me to—”

Mr. Higgins shook his head, smiling faintly:

”I’m sixty-two, Noah. I’m afraid a few aches and pains are normal.”

Debra looked up from her book:

“Father. Do let Noah fuss a bit, he’s a doctor and it makes him happy.”

”Are you going to keep teaching me,” Angela interrupted them all, “or do I have to waltz with Bobby?”

Her father bent down and took her hands.

”Back to the dance floor,” he announced. Quietly he added: “I’ll have a word with your grandfather later.”


	4. Kitchen

“I never really intended to be a doctor—” Debra hesitated a moment, and Prof. Barker noticed the glance she threw at her eldest child, playing under the dining room table with the younger one and the dog, before she continued, “It was more out of interest in the subject that I took that course. I wanted to understand.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” he replied, deciding that here was another one of the Praetorius family secrets that would reveal itself in good time; or not. “One does not always have to have practical reasons to take an interest in a topic. I myself,” he added, looking out the window at the sunny yard and the intense blue of the sky, “often wish my area of study had remained pure theory.”


	5. Master Bedroom

Noah had lost a family member, and perhaps his grief was all the greater for not easily being able to categorize – Shunderson had not been his father, or brother, or child.

Debra had been grateful in the weeks since for Lionel, that other stranger-turned-family. The professor now drove Noah to work and back every day, staying for dinner when invited, which he usually was. In the evenings the two men often sat on the porch, smoking in silence instead of the chatter she was used to.

Sometimes she or Father would join them, while the other read to Bobby in bed (Angela, she knew, was reading with a flashlight under her bedclothes; she’d done so herself at the same age after Mother had died). Sooner or later, though, Father would need to go to bed, and even Lionel would have to give way to convention and leave for the night, patting Debra’s hand with a wry jest, an ill-hidden expression of concern on his face.

If he was feeling himself, Noah would join her in bed and curl himself around her like he always had. If it was a very good night he would sleep soundly afterwards. If it was not a good night she would fall asleep waiting for him, and see dark circles under his eyes the following morning.

Debra counted the good nights and the bad ones, and hoped that soon enough the good ones would win out.

In the meantime, she felt, the household collectively held its breath.


	6. Hallway

In the end, it was a new trouble that pulled Noah out of his gloom.

Angela, between reading books about the Life Cycle of the Frog, and seeing a boy in her class bring a jar of tadpoles in for Show and Tell, had been begging her parents to let her go to the local creek with a net and a bucket. She was only six-and-a-half, and Debra had said her father ought to go along and make sure she didn’t drown; and eventually agreed to go along herself to make sure Noah didn’t drown; and then Lionel said if they wanted to make a day of it he’d go along to make sure _nobody_ drowned, and that if someone else packed the picnic he’d drive the car. Which Noah had said was just Lionel wanting potato salad and trying to convince other people to make it for him; but nevertheless on the following Saturday four adults, two children, and a dog had all somehow squashed themselves (and a picnic basket) into the professor’s car and driven to a spot just outside of town.

Amanda had wrinkled her nose as they walked across the field towards the shallow, rocky part of the creek usually favoured by the local children for catching critters.

“It smells bad.”

Noah had been about to remind her that farm fields weren’t gardens or city parks, when his nose caught it too, and it was an acrid smell that did not belong in a field.

* * *

“How does that brain manage to hold such a combination of near-genius and utter silliness?” Debra wondered a few days later, loudly enough for Noah to overhear as he paced up and down the hallway that formed the spine of their home.

“I have yet to understand it myself,” Lionel replied, at equal volume, “nor have I solved the related problem of how a man whose mind is always spinning like a dynamo manages to appear so neat and unruffled on the outside.” Noah stopped pacing.

“It’s the inverse,” he retorted, “of the phenomenon whereby my friend here,” he turned to Lionel with his hands on his hips; “who has the most remarkably orderly and precise mind, looks as though entropy is forever having its way with his body. You’re fat, you smoke like a chimney and your hair looks as though it’s never seen a comb in its life. Health-wise, you’ve got at least a dozen things wrong with you; you’ll probably outlive us all. When the Earth is a glowing cinder, Professor Lionel Barker with be sitting on a radioactive clinker trying to count a handful of electrons.”

There was a raw edge to Noah’s voice that wasn’t usually there, and Debra and Lionel glanced at each other before Debra asked her husband what was wrong.

“The creek’s wrong!” he almost shouted; before checking himself, and explaining in a softer tone: “That stuff the mill’s dumping upstream does more than just smell bad.” He rolled up his sleeve: “I’ve a few hives on my arm meself from when I picked up those dead fish to take back to the lab. Don’t worry,” he added, “they’re clearing up all right.”

“And Angela?” Debra asked, shocked.

“I didn’t let her go near the creek. She’s safe.”


	7. Dining Room Table

“..And I’ve checked the clinic records, and it’s _not_ my imagination that we’ve been seeing more children with rashes lately; and ragweed allergies that aren’t at the right time of summer to be ragweed allergies.”

“Noah, this isn’t a single patient, or even a handful, this time. You’re going to have to make an entire town better.”

Dr. Praetorius suddenly flashed a smile that his wife hadn't seen in months:  
“Even worse -- I'm going to have to convince an entire town that they're being poisoned. But I've never backed away from a challenge in my life, darling, you ought to know that by now.”

Debra frowned, but in thought, not disagreement.

“I think I should invite over all the wives in this neighborhood,” she said, “maybe the next few over as well; and I want you to tell them what you’ve just told me. You may have noticed that mama bears get very protective when their cubs are in danger.”

 


	8. Dining Room Table, Part 2

Lionel found Noah unloading slides from the projector carousel and returning them to their box, while small Angela and Anna, the housekeeper, cleared away the neglected sandwiches and half-demolished tomato aspic of a ladies’ luncheon party. Debra, reading-glasses perched on her nose and an untouched cup of coffee beside her, sat drawing up a phone tree.

“Father,” she said to Mr. Higgins, who’d been fussing over a tray, “if you want to help Anna out, take Beelzy and Bobby outside to play. Beelzy’s underfoot and staring at everyone in hopes we’ll drop some morsels, and Bobby’s.... just underfoot.“

Mr. Higgins shook the professor’s hand, then gave a whistle in the direction of the old dog and the young toddler. Both came trotting over to his side as he headed for the back door. Lionel stole a crustless sandwich off Anna’s tray as she took it up again.

“How went the day?” he asked Debra as he pulled up a chair.

“The intelligent women understood what Noah was trying to warn them about,” Debra said, “and the silly ones were won over by his charm. Well, the intelligent ones probably were too.” She smiled at Noah, who was holding a slide up to the light and squinting at it.

“Deb darling,” he said, “do you know, I think I might’ve had this one in upside-down the whole time? So hard to tell with an aerial photograph.”

His wife turned back to his best friend: 

“You’re a man, let me ask you something: do handsome men know they’re handsome? I mean— are they aware, the way a beautiful woman is, of the effect they have on others?”

Lionel swallowed the last bite of his sandwich.

“I certainly was. Don’t laugh, my dear; I once was very good-looking. More trouble than it was worth, all things considered.”

Debra tilted her head appraisingly, but did not treat his statement as a call to flattery. Eventually she picked up her coffee cup, but grimaced at the first sip.

“It’s gone cold.”

“Shall I fetch you a fresh cup? You seem busy with your diagram.”

“I doubt Anna will brook any more invasions of her kitchen,” Debra began, but the professor was already getting up.

“I shall try if enough charms yet remain to me,” he said cheerfully, “to procure you a cup of coffee from the lioness’ den.”

“Hullo Lionel.” Noah had come up behind them with the slide-projector carousel cradled in one arm. He bent to kiss the top of his wife’s head and stayed, looking over her shoulder at the phone tree. “Getting the chain of command in place, darling?”

“More the chain of communications; but I suppose it amounts to the same thing. We can rally Save Our Streams before the next town hall meeting —or send out updates— without my having to call each member myself.” Debra raised an eyebrow as the professor returned from the kitchen bearing a tray. “Well, well— _three_ cups of coffee, and a plate of coconut macaroons. Looks like somebody’s still capable of setting hearts aflutter.”

 


	9. Garden Shed

Mindful of the oily smell of the mimeograph ink, Noah had set up a couple of card tables in the shed in the back yard, as an improvised print shop to run off posters for Save Our Streams. The mimeograph sat on one table. At the other, Angela perched on a chair, coloring in the printed posters with tints from her watercolor paintbox. Just now she was intently working on the fish-and-stream image her father had carefully scratched into the stencil sheet, along with the larger letters at the top of the poster. Across from her sat Professor Barker, coloring posters also, his expression equally grave and further enhanced by the glasses perched halfway down his nose. Angela raised her eyes from her poster to glance at his efforts:

“Fish aren’t red.”

“Some are. Anyway, fish don’t have purple outlines around them, but the ones on the poster do, so we might as well color them however we like.”

“My fish are blue and grey. Most fish I've seen are blue and grey. Except goldfish, but they don't live in the streams here.”

The professor set down his paintbrush.

“Have you ever seen a live trout?”

“No.”

“Beautiful sight. Their scales are iridescent.” The professor paused, then added by way of explanation: “They reflect a spectrum of colors.”

Angela gave him a long, quizzical look, reminding him very much of her mother, before finally asking:

“All right. What's a spectrum?"

The professor was pleased that for once someone was asking him the kind of questions he liked answering, but the exchange had reminded him how inexperienced he was at explaining things to the Very Young. Then again, Angela wasn’t the Very Young, she was Noah and Debra’s daughter; he’d known her since she was born. He considered how to begin:

“You know the paperweight on the coffee table in your parents' living room?” he asked.

“The one that looks like a big diamond?”

“The very same. What color would you say it is?”

“All different colors. Rainbow.”

“Exactly,” said Lionel, pleased the child had already made the connection. “But is the color _in_ the paperweight itself? I mean, is it stained glass, like a church window?”

Angela frowned silently. A thinking look. He guessed she was picturing the crystal paperweight in her head, and remembering how—

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. Because the colors change if you tilt it, and they wouldn’t do that if it was stained glass. The cruet set on the sideboard is stained glass, and it's always red, no matter how you look at it.”

The professor nodded.

“So— if the paperweight is clear, what makes the colors?”

The little girl frowned again.

“Just a minute, I’m going to go get it so I can look at it while I’m thinking.” She jumped down from her chair and scampered away. Lionel resumed coloring, humming to himself as he worked.

* * *

Debra’s voice drifted from a window in the house:

“If there’s no Bureau of Fish, Game and Wildlife in this state, do we try the Department of Health, or the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society?”

“How about the State Department of Environmental Conservation Police?” came Mr. Higgins' reply.

* * *

 Angela returned, bearing the paperweight in both hands. She lifted it and set it carefully on the edge of the card table before squirming her way back up onto the chair. Lionel reached across the worn baize surface and slid the paperweight to the center of the table, between them.

“What do you notice about it? Besides the color.”

“It was heavy to pick up and carry.”

“That’s because it’s crystal —lead glass— not regular glass. Adding lead makes the glass easier to cut and polish. Gives it a higher index of refraction— that means, it makes it shinier,” he added. An oversimplification, but it would do for now.

“—and is the shininess what makes the colors?” Angela asked, interested, but also politely nudging the conversation forward, as she’d seen her mother do when someone took too long to get to the point.

“Not quite.” Lionel paused, wondering how to condense Newton for a six-and-a-half-year-old (and without veering off into Einstein). “All the colours we can see,” he said, “are light, at different wavelengths.” He hesitated, casting about for an analogy based in one of Angela’s interests. If he compared colours to radio frequencies, she’d ask why a rainbow wasn’t a cacophony. What a bloody mess he’d got himself into, just trying to describe the shimmer of fish scales. “The baize on this table looks green, because when the sunlight hits it, it absorbs all the light that isn’t green, and only the green light bounces back for our eyes to see.”

Angela stroked the surface of the table-top.

“Clear materials,” Lionel went on, “like glass, or water, are clear because the light passes through them. But sometimes they let more of some colors through than others. And if the clear material is a certain shape— like the angles on that paperweight —it disperses light— er, it sorts it out into the spectrum of different colours.”

The little girl tilted her head.

“Oh,” she said. “Why didn’t you say a spectrum was the same thing as a rainbow?”

All of a sudden, she reminded the professor very much of her father. He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his brow, slightly startled by the relief he felt at seeing something of Noah in the child.

Lionel had never doubted the attachment between Angela and her father; Noah wouldn’t care what anybody thought; and Debra could silence gossips with a polite, chill glance; but the little girl was at school now, old enough to overhear things. At least she didn’t _not_ look like Noah; her dark hair could have come from him. Most gossip, Lionel hoped, would be about her slightly premature birthday, and not about a troubled young woman who had—

“So? Tell me about the fish scales.”

“Eh?”

“The fish scales you were talking about earlier, before we went on to this. Do _they_ reflect colors, or do the colors go through them like the crystal paperweight?”

“Hullo, you two— holding a seance?” Noah had come out on the verandah, followed by Bobby and Beelzy. “Anna’s made up a pitcher of lemonade. Darling, be careful you don’t pinch your fingers in the table-leg bracket.” This last comment was to Angela as she gripped the edge of the table to swing herself down from her chair. Landing safely, she looked back up at Lionel:

“Are you coming? You can tell me about the fish scales when we’ve got our lemonade.”

“Noah, dear boy,” sighed the professor as he got up from the table, “children are _exhausting_.” He picked up the paperweight and handed it to his friend. Ahead of them Beelzebub, Angela, and her little brother ran towards the house, almost neck-and neck until they reached the back porch, where the four-legged creature bounded up the stairs, the girl climbed them more sedately, and the toddler laboriously made his way up by holding the balusters that supported the handrail too high for him to reach.

 _The analogy I needed,_ Lionel thought.

“Something funny, old chap?”

“Just _l’esprit de l’escalier.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn’t find anyone but my spouse to check the science on this chapter, and optics aren’t his main area of interest; so I hope I didn’t get anything too wrong.


	10. Living-Room Rug

“She’s going to wear out the grooves,” Debra observed, sipping her coffee as Angela picked up the record-player needle and moved it over to the Scottish Fantasy finale ( _allegro guerriero_ ) again.

“Well, when you’re trying to get things done it does help to feel you have several highland clans backing you up,” said Noah. Bobby gallumphed in circles around the miniature track his father, grandfather and sister were assembling on the floor.

Sometimes, Noah had always believed, it was necessary to take a break. With the town newspaper running the headline LOCAL ASSOCIATION QUESTIONS CHEMICAL DISPOSAL PRACTICES, Debra had spent Saturday morning fielding phone calls, and he’d spent Saturday afternoon fielding phone calls, and when suppertime had come he’d decided to unplug the phone for the evening. Afterwards, he’d got out the train set his wife had bought him for his birthday just after they were married.

This time, he decided, they were going to use a different signalling system. With Morse code it was too easy to get your beeps confused.


	11. Telephone

The protest outside the Recknagel Fiber and Pulp Co. had been large and loud enough that the factory had agreed to temporarily shut off the discharge pipe that emptied into the stream, “just until the matter can be looked into;” though Arthur Higgins had cautioned against declaring victory too soon:

“They’re hoping our attention will waver. Or they’re buying time to prepare a lawsuit.”

“We’ll keep up the water-pressure,” said his son-in-law cheerfully.

* * *

Debra bid Mrs. Ekmann farewell and set the phone’s receiver back on its cradle.

“Phone tree launched successfully?” Noah asked her. “Or— wait a bit, I suppose you’d plant a tree, not launch it.”

“The notice that we’ve had to cancel tonight’s meeting has been set on its course, however you wish to phrase it.” Debra looked at the rain hammering the window. “I suppose I was right to call it off? I feel a bit of a coward, being deterred by the weather— but I really don’t want anyone to have to travel in _that_.” Her husband put his arms around her.

“No one ought to. We’re likely to hear of at least one road washed out before the morning, if it keeps up like this.”

“What shall we all have for supper, now that the potluck’s off?”

“Hm. I think there’s some knockwurst in the pantry, and it’s the one thing I know how to cook. Given that _you’ve_ had a hard day planting and watering phone trees.”

“Planting, yes. Watering, I don’t think so— not in this storm.” There was a crack of thunder and Beelzy whined and crawled under the davenport.

“It’s all right, old fellow,” Noah said, but the dog remained where he was, though his tail wagged half-heartedly against one of the legs of the furniture that sheltered him. The children, by contrast, had been drawn to the windows by the flashes and rumbles from outside, and were trying to peer through the curtains of water on the other side of the glass.

“I can’t even see the driveway,” Angela exclaimed.

“I can’t even see the _steps_ ,” said Bobby, bounding up and down.

* * *

Noah almost had the knockwurst ready when Angela raced in to report Miss Norton had arrived for the meeting anyway, having come straight from her job at the library without phoning home to check for messages, and that Mommy had therefore invited her to stay for supper. Noah put in some more sausages to cook and made a mental note to take off the apron he’d borrowed from Debra before he left the kitchen. This he promptly forgot until ten minutes later when he greeted Miss Norton and wondered why she was giggling as her shook her hand.

“He doesn’t _usually_ wear frills,” said Mr. Higgins.

“Special occasion,” Noah smiled.

* * *

The power went out midway through supper. Debra got up and lit candles in addition to the ones that already adorned the dining-room table.

“Perhaps, dear,” she added to Noah, “you’d better call around and check on the situation before the phone lines go down too. Angela, will you serve the lemon bars Miss Norton brought?”

Noah returned to the table a few minutes later with news that the clinic would be all right, unless the water rose a great deal higher, but the south-east corner of the University campus was beginning to flood— he’d found out at least some of this from Prof. Barker whom he’d been unable to contact until he thought to phone the lab— and that he might take the car and go see if they needed help down there. 


	12. Garage

Professor Barker’s bull fiddle was intact, but warped past the point of salveagability by the floodwaters that had submerged the first floor of the physics building. Noah had never seen his old friend look so woebegone. He patted the physicist’s slumped shoulder and asked:

“Should we give the old girl a Viking funeral?”

“She’s too waterlogged to burn,” Barker replied dolefully. Then he added: “It _was_ an heroic ending, though. I floated all my notes to safety in her.”

“So it’s true what they say,” Noah replied gravely. “The bass viol is the only stringed instrument on which one can save more than two people in a flood.”

Barker had to laugh at that, even if the laugh was half a sob. Debra entered with an armful of old newspapers and rags.

“Can we pack it with these until it dries out?” she asked, only to be met with solemn faces.


	13. Kitchen, Part Two

“Mmrrrrrrp?!” Mehitabel woke with a jolt and looked wildly around, only to find herself on a chair in the dry, comfortable Praetorian kitchen. She arched her back and stretched on tiptoe. Curled on his bed in the corner, Beelzebub opened and eye and lifted his head. Mehitabel threw Beelzy a suspicious glance, but he did not bark, and she for her part did not hiss.

It was just over two days since Noah had come across the bedraggled cat perched on a tree branch a little higher than the floodwaters and brought her home, not without acquiring a few scratches. She was still getting accustomed to a human household, but seemed to enjoy being fussed over by the children.

“Bad dream, kitty?” Noah reached to scratch Mehitabel’s ears; she slipped away and jumped down to the floor, where she stopped, seated herself and began washing her face.

The humans in the room were busy composing a letter reminding the local paper that had the plant not been pressured into “temporarily” shutting down the sluice, the flood might be washing the whole county with industrial runoff, albeit highly diluted. Debra, twiddling the pen between her first two fingers, sat up suddenly with much the same expression Mehitabel had worn a moment earlier:

“Is Lionel coming to dinner? I forgot to plan for—”

“Don’t worry,” Noah said. “He’s in correspondence with his colleagues. He found some old letters while going through his salvaged notes, and it started his train of thought down a new line. Doubt we’ll see or hear from him before Hallowe’en.”


End file.
